Movie review: 'Human Flow' tackles global refugee crisis

By Al Alexander/For The Patriot Ledger

Friday

Oct 27, 2017 at 6:00 AM

The world has sprung a leak; or, more to the point, dozens of them. And what it’s hemorrhaging is people, most of them with brown and black skin in search of a land where they no longer need live in fear or hunger. It’s a point artist/dissident Ai Weiwei makes early and often in his sobering documentary “Human Flow.” And you won’t soon forget it. Ai makes certain of that with one haunting image after another of people suffering through no fault of their own.

It’s bad enough these refugees are forced from their homes by such disparate means as drought, famine and genocidal dictators like Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, who casually drops bombs and chemical weapons on his people. But the insult to injury is the refusal of more and more Western nations to grant these poor battered souls asylum, as they flee by foot, truck or death-defying journeys across the perilous seas of the Mediterranean.

That’s the takeaway from “Human Flow,” an eye-opening indictment of the nationalism sweeping the globe. Ai, in his own unsubtle way, dares us to ask ourselves what’s become of empathy and humanity, especially in a nation like ours were only 3 percent of the population is indigenous. Do we no longer have it in our hearts to welcome “the poor, huddled masses? Or, are we merely ignorant to the facts? Ai sides with the latter and accordingly takes us to school in a 140-minute globe trot that takes his crack camera crew and him to the epicenters of the refugee crisis.

The sites range from the well-publicized locales of Lesbos Island, the Turkish-Macedonia border and the lesser known hotspots like Jordan, Kenya and Bangladesh. The constant at each stop are the miserable living conditions and the lack of compassion on the parts of each nation’s government. What’s amazing are the mostly upbeat attitudes of individuals and entire families who’ve sacrificed everything but the clothes on their back to chase the dream of freedom. It’s quite moving. It’s also rather sad, knowing as we do that more and more democratic nations are crushing such dreams by turning refugees away due to a sudden – and unfounded – outbreak of xenophobia.

Being a refugee himself, the Chinese-born Ai knows firsthand what it’s like to be a victim of totalitarian regime that targets its own citizens. And that understanding shines through in every breathtaking frame. Being an artist, Ai (he designed the main stadium for the Beijing Olympics) composes his film with the eye of a painter, finding beauty amid the misery, even in the bombed-out cities the refugees have fled. It’s really something to see. Where he errs is in his over reliance on the camera-equipped drones he flies over every makeshift encampment he visits. After a while, they all start to look depressingly alike, with row after row of pitched tents surrounded by squalor.

Ai also tends to insinuate himself into many an interaction with the refugees, at one point showing himself getting a haircut. It’s a bit self-indulgent, but for the most part Ai keeps the camera pointed where he should – on the faces of the victims, letting them achingly speak for themselves about the hell they’ve been through – and will likely face in whatever European city they’re relocated. At least those folks will have it easier than the thousands of Afghans who were originally granted asylum in Pakistan, but we now see being forcibly booted back into the hands of the Taliban. These deportations provide some of the film’s most troubling moments, not counting the occasional body seen rotting on a beach.

Hitting even harder are the sheer numbers of people abruptly uprooted from their homes. Recent estimates put that total at 65 million and growing, making this the largest human migration since World War II. Just as shocking is how many nations are lifting a middle finger to globalization, as evidenced by the four-fold increase in border walls since the fall of Brandenburg Gate in 1989. And what about the children, whose playful, carefree nature belies the ramifications of growing up in a camp where there are no schools and limited medical treatment? Yes, the situation seems dire, which makes the closing statements by Muhammad Faris – the first (and only) Syrian astronaut, and his nation’s most famous refugee – seem like the ideal solution. And that proposal involves loading all the Assads and members of terrorist groups like Boko Haram, ISIS and the Taliban into a rocket and firing them into space – forever. And what a wonderful world that would make. But that’s not reality, which Ai reminds over and over with a film that pointedly exposes the devastation that happens when hate is allowed to triumph love.